I’m using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.
And the best part is no ads whatsoever.
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SmartTube beta on Android TV is fanfuckingtastic.
Ive been using it for years now and holy shit. Even if it doesnt blocked ads and even youtubers own ads, the app itself is FAR superior than anything what this vanilla youtube app is supposed to be.
Even if it doesnt blocked ads and even youtubers own ads
You mean even if it didn’t? Because it definitely DOES and you’re absolutely right about the rest
Yes thats what i mean. Even if it didnt then still the app is SUPERIOR IN EVERY WAY than vanilla youtube. But it does block everything. Its a godsend.
Even just having Sponsorblock built-in changed my life!!
+1
Can it be used on a “normal” android phone or just android tv?
It’s a no for phones, set top (android) boxes only. My friend has had success running it on Windows 11 and casting to his TV.
Huh? I run SmartTube beta on my phone. I don’t recall having to do anything “magic” to get it working.
Use revanced
Don’t forget Playlet for Roku!
Unfortunately it doesn’t work without a login. Also the search function stopped working entirely for me recently.
Am I the only one that hates third-party clients for Desktop? They all have terrible UI and UX. Firefox + UBlock + Youtube is the way to go. For the phone it’s NewPipe or Grayjay.
Don’t forget about Enhancer for YouTube, SponsorBlock, and DeArrow! They’re all a must-have for desktop YT.
LOL the only terrible UI is the YouTube one. I dunno how people deal with all the garbage content and vertical videos that are relentlessly crammed down your throat. Not to mention the completely fucked search function.
I used to think it is redundant too, but now see it as a quality-of-life difference. Because I can track my subscriptions and watch history, as well as have playlists. That is a massive improvement over folders of bookmarks.
You forgot sponserblock, it’s amazing!
Firefox + UBlock + Youtube is the way to go.
Unless you don’t like Google tracking everything you watch on youtube, that is.
I use the same combo on my phone without any issues or ads. Why use a client on the phone?
For me, Newpipe is faster. Plus I can track my subscriptions, playlists and watch history.
I use Firefox with ublock on desktop, works like a charm. My favourite on android is YouTube revanced
Revanced app had the superior UI/UX.
Not because if taste, but because it is the YouTube UI that then allows you to add and remove stuff from the UI, getting away from all the user-hostile stuff. If you want to.
Why had?
Has. Autocorrect fail :)
Revanced is great for mobile
I prefer just about every third-party UI to the official one…
So, what do you not like about the Freetube’s UI and UX?
Keep it quiet with the Freetube articles, I don’t want it gone lol.
Created by deletor
Youtube/google/alphabet are almost certainly aware it exists already. The only real risk is too many people switching to it.
But even then there isn’t much they can do to stop it’s use. They can’t tighten up or remove their api, but then page scraping will take over. They can obfuscation their page, but that will not work forever.
It’s a cat and mouse game that is impossible to win for them.
You know the same thing was said with Beeper’s imessage on Android pytorch success. “Apple won’t be able to change this. They’d have to change the very nature of imessage itself to block this!” And then, two days later it was blocked completely so, as much as I would hope Google couldn’t block FreeTube, don’t expect such huge successes without tempering expectation.
I can’t say I’m familiar with that particular event. But I’m guessing there is a difference there in that iMessage is well, a messaging service. YouTube isn’t, their videos are on public webpages.
All Freetube and company needs to do, if it comes to it, is find a way extract a video from a public webpage. There’s a million ways to do that.
iMessage is not a public webpage, and so there is no real way around it unless you go through their api.
deleted by creator
Deletor by created
The best part about FreeTube unlike other Third-Party clients is that it retains a better YouTube-like suggestions system for any videos you wanna watch next. Discoverability is still a very important thing for me
And you can have multiple favorites lists.
How does it do it better that yt?
I prefer NewPipe/Tubular so much that I don’t even use my desktop for YouTube anymore.
NewPipe stopped working for me some time ago, switched over to rvx which seems to work fine.
It stops working occasionally but they release fixed versions pretty fast.
Try pipepipe, they update more often than OG newpipe/tubular
you can run it on your desktop with waydroid btw
My lg tv is jailbroken so I have the ad blocked version of YouTube on it, but I was on my Chromecast with Google tv yesterday and decided to go back to the regular YouTube app since I was there.
I was watching a video of 20 minutes in length, and got one 30 second ad at the start; ok fine.
After 4 minutes, they decided to show me a 50 second unskippable ad.
I backed out of the video, and deleted the regular app.
Fuck Google.
How do you jb LG tv?
O blocked my LG TV from Internet long time ago, since I only needed a dump TV screen anyway
😄maybe there is a fun experiment in my near future
Doesn’t sound like you have anything to lose, and you might gain a new skill! Go for it!
Oh shit, I just made the switch and I’m liking it. I just “favourite” things from my sub feed in one small window, and watch in the other, and it autoplays (if I want) so I can just start doing shit while the background vids keep playing. Honestly kinda more convienient than youtubes gui. It has sponsorblock built in too, which is nice
The recommendation algorithm is the reason I use YouTube. Well over half of the videos I’m watching are from channels I’m not even subscribed to. Ads can be blocked as always.
Using it for years yes
yeah I agree! My wife would hear bitchin me if we would watch something on her iphone as i would constantly point out the fucking ads… I use in on my Fedora but sometimes (like once a month) I have a problem with the invidous instances. I wish there would be something similar to use on android, bu fortunately with Firefox& SponsorBlock it seems to block most of them…
I downloaded Newpipe from the Fdroid app store and it works very similar go freetube
I wish it didn’t use Electron.
Since they are integrating a web browser in the app, it kind of make sense here actually. For code editors though, not great…
Since they are integrating a web browser in the app
are they, though? I thought they just grab whatever data Invidious API fetches and display it with their method of choice, similar to how mobile clients for Invidious and Piped work. PlasmaTube manages to do similar thing without becoming a single purpose web browser.
FreeTube uses their own API (Local API) on top of Invidious’ API. you can choose whichever, and the other will be the fallback that’s used.
You may be right, I just assumed. :)
I would like Freetube 100x more if it had a web UI instead of a non-browser interface. A web UI with a companion extension to automatically redirect YT video links to it could be so seamless.
If it’s hosting a server on the local network that would also provide a perfect solution to not having any way for view history or settings to automatically sync between different devices.
you might like Piped or Invidious with Libredirect addon.
Can I see dislikes tho?
I enjoy the Android app. Wish the ui was a bit better tho, hard to navigate sometimes
I use Newpipe on android, you can try that. Install it using f-droid.
Pipepipe is what I’ve been using since its like newpipe with sponsorblock. Also used grayjay, revanced, libretube and tubular
Use Grayjay!!
